Slavery and Captivity in Safavid Iran

Between 1501 and 1736, enslavement connected warfare and trade to Safavid households, palaces and military service. Captives transported from the Caucasus included women who entered royal and elite households, as well as men who could be trained for the shah’s service. Other enslaved people arrived through long-distance trade. Some rose to governorships, while enslaved people also performed domestic work under an owner’s control.

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Capture, resettlement and trade

Safavid campaigns into Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, and nearby territories captured people and moved them south. Under Shah Tahmasp I, repeated invasions beginning in 1540 brought Christian Georgian, Armenian and Circassian captives into Safavid territory. In the 1550s, many women and children were taken to the Iranian plateau and some entered the shah’s and elite households. Shah Abbas I’s campaigns of 1614–16 also carried thousands south as captives.

Abbas’s campaigns also moved people in a different way: one account estimates that 15,000 Muslim, Jewish and Armenian families were forcibly relocated from Zagam, Shirvan and Qarabagh to Farahabad in Mazandaran in northern Iran, where they worked to develop royal lands. Such community resettlement assigned labor to the crown, while individually captured people could instead be sold to owners. The two forms of forced movement created distinct labor and legal arrangements.

Trade brought enslaved people from farther away. In 1628, the English traveler Thomas Herbert reported that ships sailing with him from Surat in India to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas carried more than 300 people whom Persians had bought in India. Enslaved people also arrived by sea from East Africa. These routes supplied households and the palace, alongside captives taken in wars and raids.

Training and royal military service

In 1590 Shah Abbas I established the qollar corps, a royal body of enslaved soldiers that included Georgians, Circassians and Armenians. Its commander, the qollar-aghasi, became one of the state’s leading officials. The corps helped the shah build a military and administrative force whose service depended on the crown. Men called ghulams (enslaved royal retainers) could rise to become officers with substantial authority.

Some Christian Caucasian captives who entered royal ghulam service were converted to Islam. Young ghulams received tutors in reading and court etiquette. While still beardless they studied, and at puberty they entered military service under the corps commander. Officials kept written records of their appointments, service, salaries, grants and periods away from duty. Together, instruction and written records linked court training to military service.

Allahverdi Khan, an Armenian from Georgia, rose to become commander-in-chief and governor of Fars in southern Iran. His career shows how a man brought into royal service could gain command over troops and a province. The corps’s wider organization is described in the related Safavid military history.

Work in palace and private households

Enslaved men also performed intimate and logistical work at court. One travel account describes about fifty male slaves serving the shah’s daily needs, helping him dress and overseeing palace draperies and food stores. These tasks placed attendants close to the ruler but kept their work under household command.

Eunuchs, men and boys who had been castrated, held particular palace posts. Around 1590, a group of one hundred Georgian ghulams was castrated; the most esteemed among them was appointed commander of a hundred. In the later Safavid palace system, the chief eunuch received officials’ reports for the shah and carried his replies back; other eunuchs guarded palace spaces. Chardin describes Georgian or “white” eunuchs as royal bodyguards, while black eunuchs, most of whom he said came from India, did light housework and guarded the shah’s women. According to Chardin, black eunuchs had free access to the women’s quarters, while white eunuchs could enter only on the shah’s specific instructions.

Outside the palace, wealthy merchant families in New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, also owned enslaved servants, some purchased as children from other regions. Private records reveal these relationships through property and inheritance rather than through court careers alone.

Freedom written into a will

Khwaja Poghos Velijaneants, a seventeenth-century Armenian merchant in New Julfa, listed houses, vineyards, shops and six servants in wills made in 1652 and 1659. The provisions allowed the servants to be freed only after his death. Khwaja Minas’s 1697 will similarly promised each of three servants three tomans, a monetary unit, and freedom after he died. In both cases, freedom was a future condition written by the owner into an estate, not an immediate release when the will was made.

These wills record the power owners held over enslaved people and the specific terms on which that power could end. They also show how slavery sat within household property, alongside the family arrangements and estate transfers described in Families, Women and Property in Safavid Iran.